As a system admin, I need to use additional hard drives for to provide more storage space or to separate system data from user data. This procedure, adding physical block devices to virtualized guests, describes how to add a hard drive on the host to a virtualized guest using VMWare software running Linux as guest.

It is possible to add or remove a SCSI device explicitly, or to re-scan an entire SCSI bus without rebooting a running Linux VM guest. This how to is tested under Vmware Server and Vmware Workstation v6.0 (but should work with older version too). All instructions are tested on RHEL, Fedora, CentOS and Ubuntu Linux guest / hosts operating systems.

Red Hat paid approximately $107 million in cash for Qumranet, a privately held company. Now, Red Hat positioned to deliver comprehensive, reliable and open virtualization to Linux and Windows servers and desktops.

Xen is one of the leading Virtualization software. You can use Xen virtualization to implement HA clusters. However, there are few issues you must be aware of while handling failures in a high-availability environment. This article explains configuration options using Xen:

The idea of using virtual machines to build high available clusters is not new. Some software companies claim that virtualization is the answer to your HA problems, off course that’s not true. Yes, you can reduce downtime by migrating virtual machines to another physical machine for maintenance purposes or when you think hardware is about to fail, but if an application crashes you still need to make sure another application instance takes over the service. And by the time your hardware fails, it’s usually already too late to initiate the migration.

So, for each and every application you still need to look at whether you want to have it constantly available, if you can afford the application to be down for some time, or if your users won’t mind having to relogin when one server fails.